Catching Up

Our Christmas cartoon today features the Little King, whom I vaguely remember from my childhood (possibly the Sunday funnies in the paper?), but I had never seen him animated. The whole thing is kind of pointless, but any Little King who picks up two hobos on Christmas Eve and bathes and sleeps with them while the Queen is sleeping in the other room is OK with me. I also don't understand the whole thing with the soap. An interesting point, just like in the 1913 animation, Santa actually makes the tree grow, with decorations included. Enjoy.




This entry is labeled Dec. 7, although I'm actually writing it on the 8th. Our router died on the 6th and I had to make my blog entry from Steve's computer. I'm afraid I got so preoccupied with catching up on job searching and such, I failed to make a Dec. 7 entry. So here it is:

I did my job search and found one great job right here in Pasadena which was already closed by the time I made application (of course, it took 20 minutes of filling out their employment info online to find that out).

Then I cleaned the floors downstairs (trying to use up all the wet Swiffer mop heads, because I really hate them) and vacuumed the rug and slate. That was about the scope of my holiday job for the 7th.

And, of course, I remembered Pearl Harbor.

I'm Dreaming of a Wet Christmas

It's presently raining cats and dogs outside here in Pasadena, and that's about as Christmassy as it gets in Southern California.

Today we continue with the Depression-era holiday cartoons, this one called "The Shanty Where Santy Claus Lives," produced in 1933. This was right toward the end of the era when the concept of putting burning candles onto a Christmas tree was still thought to be sane.



We went out Sunday just long enough to pick up some final items to finish with the holiday decorating. I put up the garland over the dining room window and strung the electronic-controlled LED lights in the window facing the street, so now it twinkles like stars … well, kind of. It's real pretty from the sidewalk, though.

Our router died Sunday morning, so there was no Internet connection available. We got the modem rebooted and hooked up to Steve's computer, but mine is offline for the moment. This being so, I'm posting this entry on his computer, which is a PC with a right-hand mouse (even though he's left-handed), which is kind of awkward for me.

Hope your weekend was wonderful. I suppose I'm going router shopping, as job searching must continue each and every Monday. Maybe I'll get some holiday shopping done, as well. I haven't even started yet.

All Things Disney

One of my friends on Facebook was starting her gingerbread house today (she's a professional baker, doing specialty wedding cakes and such) and was taking suggestions of after what she should model the house. I suggested the train station at the entrance of Disneyland. She's a Disneyland nut (living just a few miles from the park) and really liked the idea.

Now I sit down to write today's post and who should be the protagonist of our next cartoon but Mickey himself. This reminded me of the freebie park tickets I used to get as a member of the press. This is the second Christmas season we haven't taken someone to the Magic Kingdom.

So here it is, "Mickey's Good Deed," which was created in 1932. Many of these depression-era cartoons deal with the huge disparity between the wealthy and the destitute. These days we don't seem to care too much about that, even though the gap between the very rich and the very poor is every widening in this new century.



It's interesting that Mickey's good deed was to betray his best friend in order to give a merry Christmas to a bunch of cats. Also interesting is that the rich father and son are portrayed as pigs, an image that was carried over into the protest decade of the 1960s.

Here are two shots of our Disneyana ornaments. The first is a "hidden Mickey" disco ball (purchased at Downtown Disney on our way out of the park) and the other is one of a dozen small Mickey ornaments on the tree. We do not have a Tinkerbell or Cinderella, but we do have a Barbie ornament which Steve inherited from his mom.

Today we went down to Di-No Computers and found out about laptops for that design studio I'm thinking of starting up. I'll have to do it by the end of the year if I want to get tax breaks on all the design equipment and software I've bought this year. I'm starting to sketch out potential marketing plans and trying to come up with a bare-bones budget to get up and started. I'm thinking I could concentrate more on a full-service approach to business and marketing design, emphasizing the benefits of print promotion while integrating that with a web presence.

One last thing I have decided this evening: We need more holiday decorations. And I'm not really sure what we're going to do with all the tree lights that we no longer need, what with a prelit tree now. Perhaps the two will have some sort of mutual and inexpensive solution.

From the Mountains to the Sea

I went out to West L.A. for my interview with the temp agency today. It took two hours each way, with half of that riding on the express bus down Wilshire Boulevard. It was a long haul but the interview was really great, and the woman I'm working with there is savvy and sharp. Almost all of their services are web based, so I can cull through the available positions and also take advantage of their online tutorials.

Today's holiday cartoon is "The Snow Man" from 1932. Frosty he ain't, and there have been several versions of this short over the years, mostly edited to cut down on what critics saw as excessive terror and violence. Originally intended to be in color, it was released in black and white because Walt Disney had an exclusive arrangement with Technicolor at the time for color animated films.



I'm pretty sure this will be a weekend of holiday shopping for many of you, so have fun but keep those credit cards in your wallets and shop local. But most of all,have fun!

Here Come the Cartoons

After spending quite some time on YouTube, I've put together a sort of video advent calendar. A few of the pieces are not really cartoons, per se, but all of them bring their own special facet to the whole holiday cheer thing.

I'm going to present them in roughly chronological order, and so we start with this very bizarre yet somehow touching Russian stop-motion animation from 1913. This was cutting edge experimental at the time and, remember, all of the "special effects" were done in the camera.



The Christmas tree is up and finally decorated. We started on it last Saturday and, after figuring out how the prestrung lights plugged in together, we took our time adorning it, and it was really quite a pleasant experience. I dragged out all the boxes of ornaments and decorations on Wednesday and put the special ornaments on that evening. Thursday we finished up the tree and unloaded most of the decorations, though none are really in place, save the stockings.

This afternoon I spent with the usual surfing of the job sites and actually found three potentials. With my three percent reply rate on resumes, though, I'm not holding my breath. Still, as Confucius said, "It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop." So I keep plugging along and focus on that moment in the future when resolution will appear.

And I have the interview with the temp agency this afternoon. I'll let you know how that goes in my post tomorrow.

December Is Here

The lst of December. It's in the low 70s during the day and dips into the upper 30s at night and that translates to cold, wintery weather here in Southern California. Add a little rain to that, and everyone starts singing Christmas carols.

I thought this was an appropriate day to make my first holiday posting, since Hanukkah started this evening.

So here is my first holiday season cartoon. I started this last year and decided to continue the tradition this year. This is actually a reprise of the first cartoon from last December. It was so popular back then, I decided to repeat it.



On the work front, no official word yet from Variety, but I'm pretty sure they hired someone younger and prettier, since I'm not getting answers back from my e-mails to the HR manager there. Same goes for the HR person at Thibiant, so I seem to be back at Square One, jobwise. And, thanks to the Republicans, my unemployment will run out at the end of the month and we get to start dipping into savings to pay the bills.

I did get a call from a woman at a temp agency in West L.A., and I've got an appointment with her on Friday to come in and take their tests and sign up for possible temp assignments. I told her I wasn't really interested in anything less than three months in length, and what I'm really looking for is permanent full time. She said a lot of places are hiring temp to feel the waters before they start adding back to the staffs they cut back in the last few years. It may just be a line temp agencies use, but it would make sense to have some short-term gigs on the resume and keep my hand in the game, as it were.

I'm seriously considering starting up a design business of my own, since I have pretty much everything I need to make that happen. I'm really lousy at marketing, though, so the first year or two might be rough going, but I'm getting really sick of sending out resumes and getting nothing back. I have yet to sit down and crunch the numbers on the idea, but perhaps now is the time to take just such a dramatic step in my life.

We got a new Christmas tree from Stats last weekend, a prelighted one. The old tree has seen a decade of seasonal service and was looking rather ragged. The new one has branch tips that look just like the real thing, not green bottle brushes. We started putting ornaments on it this evening. Photos will follow once it is fully decked.

Hope your holiday season is starting off well and will continue to bring happiness and joy.

Homes That Are Just Houses Now

Nothing of significance to report on the job front at the moment, so I thought I'd take a break from obsessing about my employment status and the upgrades to home and hearth and share a little cyberspelunking I've been doing the last few nights.

It started with a discussion with Steve about all the useless crap from decades ago that still resides in one's head. I can't remember what I'm supposed to pick up at the grocery store, but I can remember all the lyrics of "Itsy Bitsy Teeney Weeney Yellow Polka Dot Bikini" from half a century ago. One other example for me is knowing the address I lived at in Tigard, Ore., when I was in first grade.

On a whim, I put the address into Google maps and, bam, there's the house, as old as the lyrics I remember so easily. The neighborhood around it is vastly different from my mental map of childhood, and the shed next to the house where we used to keep chickens is torn down, but I could clearly envision the interior spaces behind those domicile walls. I even recognized the house across the street (though many new ones have been added). I lived in this house when America sent its first astronaut into space, and it's the place we lived when my sister Kittie was born. Here's a picture of me taking brownies out of the oven in that house and one of dad cooking (check out the push-button cooktop controls).

This success got me going on a quest for more pictures of houses we'd lived in and what they look like today. The house in Tigard was the only one I remembered by address, but others I felt I could locate just by looking at the maps and satellite views of the various communities.

So I started with the first house I could really remember, which was when I was four. It was the projects we lived in on Clyborne Avenue in Chicago when dad was going to med school at Northwestern. It took some doing, but I found the projects and even the building (we were in the two-story unit on the right, second or third unit down). The place looks just as pleasant as I remember it. This is where my older brother and I had our pictures taken on a pony (an expense that sent my father through the roof at the time). Here's my pony picture and one of dad with my brother David (you can guess by now mom was the picture-taker in our family).

The next house was in Lake Oswego, Ore., and I located it because I remembered the park across the street. The entire block of bungalow houses was torn down and replaced with apartments. The houses used to back onto a dirt alley, and I remember my brother David (about three at the time) would get up early on Sunday mornings and go door to door down the alley, bare-ass naked, asking for cookies. He was the hit of the neighborhood and all the housewives and little old ladies loved him. Here are shots of David and a Christmas tree we had in that house.

The next house was near Lloyd's Center, which had just opened in Portland, Ore. This house, too, is gone, along with the entire neighborhood. It's now a parking lot amid lots of hotels, high-rises and the convention center. It was an old neighborhood with big houses and bigger trees. I remember that was where I first became aware of politics, having heated debates with my first-grade companions about the Kennedy-Nixon contest. Nixon fans said the pope would run the country if a Catholic was elected. It was on Wasco Street, and we lived there about a year and then moved to Tigard, which you've already seen.

From Tigard we moved to San Bernardino, Calif., where dad took his psychiatric residency. Our first house was a rental on Argyle Street, and it's still there. I can remember being fascinated by the fact that the entire back yard was cultivated with cactus. It was kind of like living on Mars. This is where my brother Jim inadvertently put a dart in my brother David's back, and where David almost got sucked into a storm control drain during a summer flash flood.

After a few months, we moved into the house on 18th Street. It was part of a brand new tract home development (in fact, about a third of the homes weren't even completed yet). Our back yard butted up against an abandoned orange grove and, again, it was other worldly to wander back among the trees and just pluck oranges off and eat them right there for free. The place looks kind of worn out and run down now, doesn't it? All those big trees were barely six feet tall during our residency there.

When Dad finished his residency, we moved to Morro Bay and he started work at Atascadero State Hospital. It was amazing living just up the hill from the beach, and every night we fell asleep hearing the surf in the distance. I remember once we were evacuated from school because of a tsunami warning (the high school is on the beach and actually below sea level), and everybody came up to our house on high ground to watch the town get washed away: it didn't happen.

From Morro Bay we moved into San Luis Obispo on Johnson Ave. It was a very nice house. Now the front yard has a wall and terracing that hides the spanish colonial look of the place, but here's a shot of what it looked like when we moved in. Below that is an antiquated Polaroid print of one of our Christmas trees there.

We spent several years in this house (you may have guessed by now we moved around a lot), except for one year when dad took a job in Reedley in the California Central Valley, and we lived in a huge house on Ward's River Ranch (a thoroughbred horse breeding and training farm). I couldn't get a street shot of it, since the house sits in the middle of the ranch, which is probably about 50 acres. We all loathed the Central Valley, so we moved back to San Luis Obispo the next year.

From San Luis Obispo, the family moved to Ketchikan, Alaska, because my dad got a job as chief of mental health services for the Gateway Borough. The house we lived in there was being completely remodeled when Google passed by with its cameras, so who knows what it looks like now.

Dad came down with triple pneumonia in Ketchikan (he was always an overachiever), and when he recovered the family moved back down to San Luis Obispo, they bought a house up Johnson Avenue from the old one, and that was home for a good 30 years. You can barely see the house in this photo. Since it was on a busy street, we planted hedges that grew up to block the traffic noise. They also blocked the view of the house, and people often commented they didn't know there was a house there until they got out of their cars.

This is the house I lived in when I went to college, and from there, I've moved on to many places of my own. But it seems just amazing to me that, here in the 21st Century, I can take such an extensive walk down memory lane and visit so many places I called home. Perhaps in an upcoming entry I'll do all the places that I've lived since graduating from college. Or maybe not. Weigh in on the idea and I'll see if on it's worth up following. Well, you know what I mean.